Thursday, 10 November 2011

Licencing for SharePoint Developers

I was looking at licencing around development machines. I thought I was pretty comfortable in understanding it and then I saw this statement "Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN does not include Exchange Server or SharePoint Server.".

Now it doesn't affect my client but I know it affects a lot of Microsoft partners. I have been under the assumption that MSDN Professional included SharePoint Server standard and enterprise. You have to have the premium or ultimate editions.

Each test that access your non-production (covered by MSDN) would need I guess the ultimate edition as well. Perhaps the testing licence covers this.

But pretty expensive, as an example if you had 3 devs, 2 testers, 1 architect and 3 BA's and a PM (They all access the SharePoint test sites covered by MSDN). This would require 10 premium or ultimate MSDN licences. In the UK assuming these are new MSDN premium subscriptions (+- £3500 each) this comes in at a wopping £35K; for a small project and this is the dev licencing, it seems very high. I really dislike the complexity in Microsoft licencing.

It would actually be cheaper to by 6 MSDN licences for the devs, testers & architect and pay for the SharePoint 2010 standard server licences (£2000/VM), buy OS and buy a coupls of CAL's.

Honestly, why doesn't Microsoft make licencing simpler. Additionally charging a Project Manager and end users for MSDN for looking at non-production sites £3500 is crazy.

John Stover has explained licencing for SharePoint pretty well in his series of posts on licencing SharePoint.